Meditation is simply paying or giving attention to something without effort or with minimal effort. That thing could be outside or inside the body.
Orthogonal to inside or outside is the idea of limit. That is, that something is limited in space or time or both. Or that something is unlimited.
So something outside and limited, like a candle flame.
Or something outside and almost limitless or unlimited like universal space or universal life, by which I mean that from which all life in the universe has come.
For both inside and outside, for both the limited and the unlimited, when one uses attention the same way - with minimal effort - it is meditation.
As one rests one's attention on something, effort-less-ly, one learns about attention from practice:
- Over a brief meditation session, or a long session,
- over many iterations,
- over the ease of bringing the attention upon something at will,
- over the frequency of attention slipping away,
- over the quickness and ease of recovery to the starting object,
- and so on.
All this (and more) is training the attention through daily practice.
The choice of object decides whether meditation transforms one internally in specific ways or simply hones one's mental prowess.
A transcendental or unlimited object, inside or outside, means one's attention cannot rest on the object for a long time. It necessarily slips away.
A simple example - infinity of natural numbers. I can only hold about, say, 7 or 10 numbers in working memory at once. Beyond that, I switch to general patterns or generating algorithms or whatever helps me to think about the entire infinity of natural numbers at once.
From our own experience, and reports of unethical and immoral scientists, we know that meditation on an infinite object outside does not change us.
Not permanently.
But there are reports of people who have been transformed by meditating upon, or constantly remembering, some entity either immanent or transcendent or both (both within and without - technically called omnipresent).
Sometimes we ourselves have had a numinous experience. As we could not hold on to it as a continuing experienc-ing, it became a memory. It is still useful, for inspiring oneself and others, but one must go beyond a single, or even many, such past experiences. [1]
Feeling the meaning or presence is the next step up from meditation, simply, from thinking to feeling, when one's attention is completely filled by the object chosen to represent that presence. [2]
This complete washing out of attention is technically called samadhi. [3]
It is like tuning an old TV receiver manually and the screen then filling with images decoded from that tuned signal.
But here, when an infinite conscious presence is represented by the object of meditation, the TV screen of the attention and mind is taken over by that presence, which then works on increasing the sensitivity, resilience, and empathy of the meditator. Put differently, changing an old TV receiver from tuning into only the TV spectrum of frequencies to the entire electromagnetic spectrum. With analog and digital decoding as well!
Now, after enjoying and ruminating over it, please drop the TV analogy completely because a TV is not a conscious entity.
While there is indeed a mechanical or physical aspect to the meditative process, it is not rule bound in the way one would think if only one person were involved. As one goes deeper and deeper inside, separative factors (I vs. others) are replaced by factors more and more common to all conscious beings. For example, life and the source of life are about as abstract and common to all living beings as one can consider.
Thus, in a very simple way, one shifts from the definition of meditation itself to different objects of meditation and then from thinking to feeling.
NOTES
[1] One difficulty is due to the habituation ability of the body and mind. They like to feel and then put that feeling into memory to chew over later.
[2] The presence need not be infinite, at least initially. There is a gradation of objects from limited to unlimited to beyond.
[3] Per Sw. Vivekananda in his Raja Yoga, it takes 12x12x12 seconds, approximately 28-30 minutes of effort-less mental attention upon an object for its internal representation to fill one's attention. Once it happens many times, though, it can occur much faster, even reducing from minutes to seconds or less.
